It's become fashionable among the national conservative right to oppose immigration, both legal and illegal. Various primers and mission statements for the movement call for the United States to "drastically reduce legal immigration from its current levels" via a "temporary full immigration moratorium," citing contemporary immigration as "a source of weakness and instability."
National conservatives invoke heritage and tradition when they speak of what they want to conserve. But what they often fail to mention—or, at the very least, fail to accurately represent—is how intertwined immigration is in American heritage and traditions. For all their invocations of the Founding Fathers, they offer an incomplete view of what the Founders actually said about immigration.
